All posts tagged Health Care Litigation

WASHINGTON—A group of individuals who challenged health insurance subsidies tied to the Affordable Care Act moved quickly Thursday to get an appeal in front of the Supreme Court.

The challengers, Virginia residents who opposed the subsidies, filed a petition with the high court just nine days after the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va. upheld an Obama administration regulation that said subsidized insurance was available to qualifying consumers nationwide. Read More »

A federal judge on Wednesday upheld the legality of subsidies the federal government is making available to some consumers who buy health insurance through federally run online exchanges. Read the full story here.

The decision hands an important victory to the Obama administration. If the judge had ruled for the challengers, the decision could have upended implementation of a key piece of the 2010 Affordable Care Act. Read More »

A fresh debate about the limits of presidential authority has been stirred by President Barack Obama’s decision this week to allow insurers to keep selling policies that they earlier cancelled to comply with the new health law.

The Obama administration says it’s not changing the law but delaying enforcement and has the “inherent authority to exercise discretion to ensure that their statutes are enforced in a manner that achieves statutory goals and are consistent with other administrative policies,” reports the Washington Post. But other legal observers have questioned the constitutionality of the “fix,” saying the president overreached. Read More »

A provision of the health law requiring employers to provide health insurance for their employees that includes birth control “trammels” the First Amendment, a federal appeals court ruled Friday.

The ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit marked the second time a federal appeals court has held that the so-called contraceptive mandate, a controversial element of the health law, may impose a substantial burden on religious rights. Read More »

The U.S. financial crisis, while bad for many Americans, may have actually been good for some lawyers—particularly those who practiced in federal courts.

New criminal and civil cases filed in U.S. federal courts increased more than 13% between the end of fiscal year 2007 and fiscal year 2011, which, by the way, set a five-year high with 402,885 new cases filed nationwide.

However, that growth may be tapering off a bit. New case filings fell 4% to 386,664 cases nationwide in fiscal year 2012, which ended Sept. 30, according to new case management statistics just released by Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts.

The centerpiece of the Supreme Court’s three days of health-care arguments was the two-hour Tuesday morning session about the constitutionality of the mandate to carry health insurance or pay a penalty.

We did a quick tally of how many lines in the transcript were spoken by each justice. The numbers show how the conservative justices dominated the first half of the session, battering Solicitor General Donald Verrilli with questions about broccoli and burial services, while liberal justices did the vast majority of the talking in the second half as they questioned the law’s challengers.

The conservative justices—Chief Justice John Roberts and justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy and Samuel Alito—accounted for 75% of justice questions in the first half (462 of 614 lines in the transcript by our count—your results may vary slightly). Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Scalia were easily the biggest talkers in that . . . Read More »

And on Day 3 of the highest-profile Supreme Court argument in a generation, the justices were back sparring with each other: This time, the issue was whether if the individual mandate portion of the law is struck down, the rest of the law has to come with it.

According to the WSJ, the split seems likely to fall on familiar lines, with the four liberal justices supporting the notion of “severability,” and the four conservative justices voicing skepticism.

One the one side stood Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the court’s senior liberal, who said that if the justices must choose between “a wrecking operation and a . . . Read More »

By now, all the scribes lucky enough to watch Tuesday’s argument at the Supreme Court over the constitutionality of President Obama’s health-care law have filed out, and put pens to paper.

From reading the coverage, the consensus seems to be that Justice Anthony Kennedy, the likely holder of the pivotal swing vote, has deep skepticism over the law. If such is the case, it could be lousy news for the Obama administration.

WSJ Supreme Court reporter Jess Bravin acknowledges that Justice Kennedy voiced skepticism, but writes that Kennedy’s questions toward the end “suggested that people who don’t carry health insurance are still engaged in the health-care market—which . . . Read More »

Trying to predict outcomes of Supreme Court cases based on their oral arguments is a difficult game. Too often cases that appear to go one way during oral argument end up going the other way come June.

Still, Justice Anthony Kennedy’s comment Tuesday morning during the arguments at the heart of the health-care case have to leave the government — and the Obama administration — a little worried.

According to this WSJ story, Justice Kennedy, largely viewed as the swing vote in the case. said Tuesday the government has a “very heavy burden of justification” . . . Read More »

Republican presidential candidate, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum speaks in front of the Supreme Court in Washington, Monday, March 26, 2012, as the court began three days of arguments on the health care law signed by President Barack Obama. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)

If the spotlight ain’t following you, well, follow the spotlight.

Such seems to have been the strategy of Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum on Monday. Santorum showed up outside the U.S. Supreme Court during the closely watched health-care arguments, and took jabs at his opponent Mitt Romney. Click here for the AP story.

According to both the WSJ and the AP, Santorum criticized Romney for passing a health law that includes a state requirement for people to carry insurance coverage that’s similar to the federal requirement at the crux of the case before the Supreme Court.

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The Law Blog covers the legal arena’s hot cases, emerging trends and big personalities. It’s brought to you by lead writer Jacob Gershman with contributions from across The Wall Street Journal’s staff. Jacob comes here after more than half a decade covering the bare-knuckle politics of New York State. His inside-the-room reporting left him steeped in legal and regulatory issues that continue to grab headlines.

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